Thursday, February 27, 2014

I feel pretty confident in stating the end of this year’s stupefying winter. Disney’s Frozen comes out on DVD and Blu-ray March 18. That is when they will end this nearly four-month long publicity stunt.

When the animated film slid past the $300 million mark on January 8, I thought they would turn the polar vortex machine off and give us all a little thaw. Then they re-released a sing-a-long version – so they kept the weather machine on ice (which means the opposite of what it usually does when you’re talking about a weather machine.) I thought this might end last week, but they announced the release date for take-home units and boom – the return of the Winter Kingdom (as it is called in South Korea, where the movie is setting records without all the weather-related promotion.)

My theory is that Walt met with Nikola Telsa at the New Yorker hotel in 1943. Walt agreed to back a number of Tesla’s projects, knowing that a lot of them were going to be perfect for his grand amusement park plans. Tesla dies soon after. Nearly all of his personal notes were nowhere to be found. Of course, no one thought to look in Hollywood. (A great sequel to Savings Mr. Banks would be Nearly Saving Nikola.)

Disney used Tesla’s weather machine sparingly – just a nudge here and there to help make the worthless swampland he bought in Florida habitable. His successors saw things differently in late 2013, leading us to the Frozen winter of ‘13-14.

I’m asking Disney to turn the damn thing off if I pre-order the combo set. I’d like to let it go, let it go, but the cold does bother me anyway.